


the other side of sorrow

by hawkwing_lb



Series: though your promise count for nothing [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Clarke pulls the lever all on her own, F/F, Gen, Mention of Suicidal Ideation, Minor Clarke Griffin/Lexa, Mount Weather
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2016-11-22
Packaged: 2018-09-01 12:29:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8624518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hawkwing_lb/pseuds/hawkwing_lb
Summary: Her hand is sweaty on the lever. Her heart hurts. Her stomach hurts. This isn't triage. This is --
  
  "I have to save them," she whispers.





	1. he dies for you

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know that I set out to write fraught angst about killing people, but I seem to have done just that anyway.

Raven's plan is stupid. Killing the Commander will achieve nothing except the destruction of what's left of the Ark. Even if Clarke _could_ kill her: for all her slenderness, Lexa looks like muscle and whipcord beneath her armour, and moves with perfectly balanced grace.

Besides, she's seen the Commander's glance dip to her sleeve. Lexa knows she has a knife -- or at the very least suspects.

Clarke's not used to being looked at the way the Commander is looking at her. The Hundred look -- _looked_ \-- at her like they expect her to know what to do, like they were expect her to be able to make things right, a combination of trust and hope and occasional resentment that makes her feel old and very tired and sometimes intensely frustrated: she never asked for this, but they trust her and they're _hers._

The adults of the Ark look at her like she hasn't fought and healed and killed and bled. They see a child, a teenager, the girl she used to be back before a year of solitary with the near-certainty of execution at the end of it, back before the dropship, back before the _ground._ (Back before she knew her mother killed her father for wanting to tell the truth.) They look at her like they expect _her_ to trust _them_ , and talk over her with the certainty that because they were in charge on the Ark, they know what to do on the ground.

(It's different down here. It's dirtier. It's not sterile, and it's not clean, and it might be more forgiving of mistakes than vacuum but they _understood_ vacuum. Down here, nothing's simple. Nothing's _safe._ )

Finn killed for her, so the blood of those eighteen innocents are on her hands as much as his. She's a killer in so many different ways. The village she didn't know they would be destroying, when they sent up the flares -- too little too late to save three hundred lives on the Ark -- that Bellamy's selfishness left them no other choice but to try. Anya's Tris, after the explosion on the bridge. The man whose throat she cut to escape. The three hundred Grounder warriors burned alive by the inferno of the dropship's engines. And Anya's blood is on her hands, too. She was careless. She should have known better.

But she's walked into the Commander's camp twice, alone and without escort, and let the warrior called Indra draw blood without flinching. She's tried to trade for Finn's life (she brought a Reaper back, brought _Lincoln_ back, and it's not enough). And she's begged. She's begged, because that's all she has left. Finn is -- he's an idiot and a murderer, but he loves Clarke and Raven loves him, and he doesn't deserve to die this badly.

And Lexa looks at her with something like respect. Something like understanding, though her utter refusal to be swayed by any argument is cool, controlled, and absolute.

"Can I," Clarke says at last, and her voice is cracked and broken, because she knows what she has to do, the only thing she _can_ do, if the Commander lets her, and _Oh God,_ it hurts. "Can I say goodbye?"

It's not murder, Clarke tells herself. It's triage.

She hates the respect it the Commander's eyes. She hates that the only mercy the grounders have to offer -- that Lexa _allows_ her -- is the cruellest one.

But oh, God. She understands it, too. It's still mercy.

_Blood must have blood_ , the Commander said, and there's no way a leader in this kind of culture can afford to look _weak_


	2. because she was mine

"I lost someone special to me, too," Lexa tells her by the embers of Finn's pyre.

This is startling. This is... sympathy, or something like it. As close as the Commander can come, at least. Clarke watches the Commander sidelong, wondering where Lexa's going with this: in their handful of conversations, the Commander's never yet said anything simply for the sake of hearing herself talk.

"Her name was Costia _._ " Lexa's voice is conversational, matter-of-fact, but her knuckles are white where they are folded over the hilt of her sword. "She was captured by the Ice Nation, whose queen believed she knew my secrets." Only the whiteness of her knuckles and the faint tension in her jaw, the momentary twitch of a muscle in her neck, betrays that she feels anything. "Because she was mine, they tortured her. Killed her. Cut off her head."

Clarke cannot believe her calm. Cannot believe her when she says -- resigned, accepting, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to have simply _stopped caring_ , to be able to turn your feelings off at will _: Love is weakness._

Later, too much later, she will understand what Lexa was trying to tell her. Lexa does care. Lexa cares deeply and intensely, but Lexa holds in her care the lives of not just dozens or hundreds of people, but thousands. (Maybe tens of thousands: the Ground is wider and far more populous than Clarke could have ever imagined, on the Ark.)

Lexa will not put her own wants before her people's needs, and love is selfish.


	3. love is weakness

It is one of the nights they have run out of things to argue over in the strategy tent when Clarke begins -- only begins -- to understand just how ruthless Lexa is. Ruthless, above all, with _herself._

This is one of the few times that Lexa has offered her wine and talked, a little, a very little, of topics other than war. The conversation has turned to grounder culture, and to the coalition that Lexa commands. Clarke has learned a little from Lincoln, and from the individual _gona_ of Lexa's army: to survive down here, she needs to know everything she possibly can, and she hasn't hesitated to ask questions of the handful of men and women who're willing to answer them. (Not just about politics, but about food, hunting, farming, preserving, healing -- she doesn't understand, not really, why her own people are so reluctant to accept the fact that the grounders know things they might not. Apart from Octavia, but Octavia's found a place on the ground that she never had on the Ark, so that's not at all surprising.)

"The Ice Nation is part of your coalition," Clarke says, cautiously. The wine is sharp and sour and sweet all at once -- she's still not used to the way things _taste,_ here on the ground, the bursts of flavours on her tongue, so different than the processed algae of the Ark or the rare treat of Farm Station vegetables. It makes her head a little fuzzy, though not as much or as quickly as moonshine. But she wants -- no, she _needs_ \-- to understand. "And their queen? I thought you said --"

Lexa's jaw tightens a fractional amount. Clarke is coming to realise that the Commander betrays her strong emotions with the tiniest signs of tension, easy to miss: on the surface she's all calm, level, perfectly controlled. "Their queen is the one I told you of, yes. The one who killed Costia. _You_ are surprised, _Klark_ of the Sky People, that I make peace and common cause with my enemies?"

Put like that, Clarke really can't argue. Her people have benefited, are benefiting, from Lexa's willingness to do just that. But -- "I thought _blood must have blood._ Isn't that your way?"

Lexa's shrug is an infinitesimal roll of one shoulder. "We were at war when it happened," she says, matter-of-fact. "Such things happen in war. The Ice Nation lost, in the end, and the queen was compelled to swear her fealty to me and enter the coalition. Had I pursued a personal vendetta instead of allowing Nia of the Azgeda to sue for peace, many more of my people would have died. I would have overextended my forces and weakened the coalition, perhaps fatally. A leader cannot afford to set vengeance for the dead above their duty to the living, Clarke."

She says it with the same complete acceptance that she had when she spoke of her own death, when they faced the _pauna_. Clarke didn't understand, not then. She doesn't, now. How can Lexa be so calm? It's unnatural.

But she doesn't know how to pierce Lexa's calm, make her admit she feels _something_. She's not even sure she wants to _._


	4. the living are hungry

The air smells of gunpowder and blood. Mount Weather's door has finally cracked open in blood and sweat and sacrifice, and Clarke knows, _fuck,_ she _knows_ , that the fight is only just beginning, but she can't help the thrill of triumph that lifts her blood.

 _I'm coming for you_. Jasper, Monty, Bellamy, Miller, Harper, _all of them_ , she'll get them out of the Mountain. She'll get them _safe._

She is trying very hard not to think how high the cost in lives will be for Lexa's people. It'll be bloody, even with some of the Ark's guns with them, in the hands of her own people. Avoiding genocide -- an ugly word, a dirty word -- will have a cost, but even if the Mountain folk live like vampires on the blood of the grounders, there's no excuse for murdering _children_ whose only crime was to be born.

And then Lexa, the blood on her face in stark contrast to the dark bruises of her warpaint, ordering her troops to _stand down._

"What did you do?" Clarke asks, the words half-rage and half-fear and half sudden, horrified, _inevitable_ recognition. She knows. Of course she already knows. She has spent entirely too much time in the Commander's company, in the days since

 _\-- Finn's blood all over her hands, his shuddering breath against her cheek, his "Thanks, Princess," a scalding benediction_ \--

in the days since they'd agreed first a truce, and then an alliance to face the Mountain. She was there for the missile -- she, just as much as Lexa, made that choice -- and she sees in Lexa's face the same cold, controlled determination she saw then.

And pain, but acknowledging the pain will make it harder to hate Lexa and she cannot acknowledge it because -- well, because _fuck,_ she should have _expected_ this, should have _planned_ for this, should have realised that it was a _possibility_. Lexa as much as told her it would be: You _are surprised, Clarke of the Sky People, that I make peace and common cause with my enemies?_ And she hadn't. She _hadn't,_ and if she can't hate Lexa then the only person left for her to hate is _herself._

 _Love is weakness._ More fool her, for imagining the affection in Lexa's kiss was anything like a promise.

Lexa's jaw is tight. Her eyes are level. "What you would have done," she says, evenly, and only the faintest twitch of her eyebrows betrays any feeling at all. "Saved my people."

The memory of Lexa's kiss is like a brand on Clarke's lips, and a distant part of her wonders if this would be different if she'd said _yes_ instead of _not yet_ (but she doubts it: _love is weakness_ ) and all she can do is glare at Lexa with stunned rage and try to bite the bitterness out of her mouth, but her words are like water against Lexa's stone: it would take aeons to wear it away, and she _doesn't have time._

Lincoln tries, too, and Clarke cannot help but flinch as he is beaten down.

Lexa meets her eyes, implacable. There is nothing left for Clarke to say, and so she says nothing.

But Lexa does. "May we meet again," she says, quietly.

It is the last thing she says to Clarke before she leaves. Leaves, and doesn't look back.

Clarke is too furious, then, to realise that it is probably down to Lexa's implacability that she is not now a captive of the Mountain herself. Because there's no reason that the Commander wouldn't have betrayed them even more completely, if she felt she had to. Though afterwards, of course, there's no one left to ask who might know the truth, no one she could trust to tell it to her, but either Wallace neglected to _ask_ the Commander to hand over any Arkers with her -- and she thinks that's an unlikely oversight -- or he _did_ ask, and Lexa turned him down, bargained him down to this and only this, _all our people withdraw_.

Her people, and not Clarke's.

Clarke still has a _chance._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This isn't actually canon-Clarke, I guess.


	5. what you would have done

 

She wants to be _the good guy_. She wants to believe so badly that there _can_ be good guys and bad guys, like in the old movies they'd watch on the Ark. That there's a _right_ choice instead of just the painful, necessary one, the choice that protects what's _hers_ at the cost of everything else.

She doesn't want this. But she shoots Dante Wallace, and Cage still won't back down.

The path Mount Weather's leaders have chosen in the past three generations is stupidly short-sighted, selfish, cruel, _evil._ If they'd _asked_ the grounders for help, instead of simply taking what they want -- if they'd practiced exogamy, married out, they might have acquired resistance to the radiation through inheritance. If they'd asked _her people_ for help, they could have worked something out that left them _all_ alive. But the Wallaces don't seem to see anyone other than their own as really human: just savages, outsiders, interlopers, _threats_.

(She doesn't want to see the parallels with how her own people look at the grounders, but she's not blind. It'll take time for the Arkers to accept they aren't the only humans left in the universe. Hopefully they'll manage the adjustment better than the Mountain has.)

But that's the Wallaces. She can't hold all the inhabitants of Mount Weather at fault for the sins of their leaders. There are children here. And people who've helped her own, at risk of their lives.

But Cage will not back down. And that's her mother, on the screen in front of her. Those are her people. That's her mother. Her responsibility. She didn't _want_ this, but she knew, she _knew_ when Lexa sounded the retreat that this was probably the choice she'd have to make, if she was to have any chance at all.

Mount Weather's leaders have made _their_ choices. Cage thinks she'll flinch. Cage thinks she's weak. Cage will kill all of her people and then _his_ will be free of the Mountain, free to go anywhere on the surface. Free with their guns and their acid fog and their complete certainty that _they're the only ones who matter._

She's already responsible for three hundred deaths. Nearly six hundred, counting the people she chose not to save at Tondisi. More, if she counts the ones she let the Hundred kill with their ignorance, when they launched those futile flares.

Those are her friends down there. Her mother. _Kane._ Bar Clarke herself -- and Bellamy -- they're all that's left of what passes for leadership among the Arkers. There's a cold, logical core beneath her anguished heart that tells her letting Cage kill them is tantamount to sentencing the rest of her people to death, too: Kane has become a voice of reason, and Abby, for all her faults, is their most experienced doctor -- besides Jackson, the only one to survive to reach the ground.

She's not weak. She can live with three hundred more lives on her conscience, to keep her people safe.

And with Emerson outside the door, they're out of time.

Bellamy is white-faced. Monty is staring at her, eyes wide, shocked -- he never expected it would come to this, she thinks: he expected she'd find _some other way._ (She hoped for that, too, but in the back of her mind she _knew_ that this was the only leverage they'd really have, and there was always the chance that Cage wouldn't think she had the guts to carry through.)

Her hand is sweaty on the lever. Her heart hurts. Her stomach hurts. This isn't triage. This is --

"I have to save them," she whispers. _I have to._

Bellamy's hand fits over hers, trembling. "Together," he offers. But she can't, she _can't_ , let him carry this too. Only one of them needs to bear it.

 _I bear it so they don't have to_ , says the memory of Dante's voice in her ear.

"No, Bellamy." Her voice is a thin, cracked thing, but strong enough, for all that. "This is mine to carry."

She pushes his hand aside, and brings the lever down.


	6. the back of sacrifice

She makes herself look. She chose this, as much as Cage Wallace ever did. So many dead. Some so small. Younger than Charlotte, and less guilty. _Maya._

 _What you would have done,_ Lexa says in her memory, with regret but no apology. _Saved my people._

It turns out Lexa knows her better, maybe, than she knew herself.

She wants to hate Lexa. She wants to believe that _Lexa_ forced her to this, that without that betrayal this would never have had to happen -- but _she_ made this choice, and maybe she'd have had to make it anyway.

Maybe it would have been Lexa it the control room beside her. Maybe Lexa could've borne this more easily. Clarke doesn't know what she'd give, to be able to have given that terrible choice into someone else's hands.

(Her people. Her responsibility. Her choice.)

Three hundred lives -- more than three hundred -- for fifty. She makes herself look, but she can't make the numbers add up to anything other than _atrocity._

"We had no choice," she tells Jasper. Tries to tell herself. But there was a choice, and she made it, and in its making...

She doesn't know how to live with this. Doesn't know how to live with knowing that she made this choice. That she's not smart enough, not strong enough, not _good_ enough to have found another way. That she killed _children_ \--

That she'd do it again, if she had to. That's the worst thing. Knowing that she's done it, that she can do it again.

Or maybe the worst thing is that Kane tells her _well done_ and means it, that her mother has no recriminations about the dead children, just _maybe there are no good guys_ which is almost like forgiveness, that most of the survivors congratulate her like she's done something to be _proud of._

Jasper's fury, Jasper's condemnation, she can't like it but it doesn't make her sick inside the way the _praise_ does. She wants to scream _Look at what I've done!_ in their faces, wants them to acknowledge there's nothing here but monstrous necessity, _monstrosity_.

She doesn't scream. She doesn't cry. She doesn't vomit. She wants to do all these things, but she doesn't, she thinks, really deserve to get what she wants.

She wants absolution. She wants never to have had to make this choice. Neither of those things are anything anyone can give her. So what good would screaming do, or vomiting? None.

She thinks maybe she's not going to be able to live with this. She doesn't feel like a person, anymore. She feels like a ghost. Like a shell, hollowed-out and empty. She tries. God, she tries. She moves, she speaks, she joins the scouts and helps carry the wounded on the way back to Camp Jaha, she eats and breathes and goes through the motions of living and every time someone _smiles_ at her it feels obscene.

She should be glad they're alive, but all she can see when she looks at them are the faces of the dead.

Monty understands, at least a little. He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't smile when he looks at her. There are shadows in his eyes: she might have made the choice, but he made it possible.

They both have to live with that. She took away, she thinks, his last claim to any innocence. He's not a kid anymore. None of them are. None of them ever will be again.

It is two and a half days back to Camp Jaha, and she doesn't think she can _stand_ to go back. Not among people whose first instinct is to treat her as a child. Not with the weight of this choice on her hands, on her conscience, on her soul _._

Not when she can hardly stand to look at them. She doesn't want to hate them, but she can't bear their admiration. Their pity would be worse. She doesn't deserve either, and they deserve _better_ than she can give them.

She's got nothing left to give.

In the end, she can't walk through Camp Jaha's gates. She can't go back. She can't --she still doesn't know how to live with this. She's burned out some part of herself -- the human part, the part that can feel anything other than tiredness and disgust and above all _self_ -disgust -- and all that's left...

There's not really much left. If she stays in Camp Jaha, she thinks, she might wind up eating a gun. She can't let herself do that, not to her friends. Not even to her mother. She _has_ to learn to live with this, and she can't do that here.

Not when she wants to break her fist on Bellamy's teeth when he says, "Hey. We'll get through this."

"I'm not going in."

He's at her side, stained with sweat and dirt and blood, his expression weary but not hollow, not like Monty's has been. Not like she feels inside. _He_ thinks, in the end, she did the right thing, the only thing: he believes Kane when the older man says _good job_ and _well done._ He sees that she saved his sister, and in his eyes that's the only thing that counts.

"If you need forgiveness, I'll give that to you. You're _forgiven._ " Pleading, begging, uncomprehending. " _Please_ come inside."

He has no idea, really. As if what she did is something that can be forgiven.

She looks at him, and she remembers when they were innocent. Not that innocent, maybe they were never that innocent, but more innocent than this. And it hurts.

They were rivals, at first. Allies, after; then partners, eventually friends. Always _leaders_ , though: somehow they were always the ones who stepped up, who made the decisions, took the responsibility. Bellamy's been a constant in her life since the moment they stepped off the dropship. He's grown, just as she has, but he might never understand what she feels right now.

She doesn't want him to. Let him be spared this, at least: most of his dead were killed in ignorance or in battle. But she knew _exactly_ what she was doing when she pulled that lever, and she did it anyway.

"Take care of them for me," she says, because that's what he's always tried to do. That's what _they've_ always tried to do, and she can't. Not anymore.

" _Clarke._ " He's still trying. "You don't have to do this alone."

She remembers Lexa, after Finn. _What you did tonight will haunt you to the end of your days._ And later, counting the dead at Tondisi, saying _Victory stands on the back of sacrifice_ and _The living are hungry._ She remembers Dante Wallace, and she thinks she understands his choices a little better, now.

His, and Lexa's too.

"I bear it," she tells Bellamy, deliberately quoting Dante, and watches him flinch before her quiet words, "so they don't have to."

She doesn't know where she's going to go. She just knows she can't stay here.

When she hugs him -- hard, biting her tears back because _this_ hurts, too, whispering "May we meet again" against his shoulder -- when she hugs him and walks away, he doesn't try to stop her.

She can't walk away from what she's done, but she can walk away from _here_ until she's learned to live with it. (If she can learn to live with it.)

She doesn't look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably too much angst, right?
> 
> Let me know what you think, if you feel like it.


End file.
